Deeplinks Blog posts about NSA Spying

Senate to Vote on USA FREEDOM Act Later in the Week

Section 215 has expired. At least for now.

The law that the NSA used to authorize its collection of vast amounts of information about the telephone calls of ordinary Americans is no more. Even though it’s likely temporary, it’s a good thing and we should pause to celebrate a little. The calls and emails Congress received from people across the country and across the political spectrum changed the debate.

The story being spun by the defenders of Section 215 of the Patriot Act and the Obama Administration is that if the law sunsets entirely, the government will lose critical surveillance capabilities. The fearmongering includes President Obama, who said: “heaven forbid we’ve got a problem where we could’ve prevented a terrorist attack or could’ve apprehended someone who was engaged in dangerous activity but we didn’t do so.”

So how real is this concern? Not very. Section 215 is only one of a number of largely overlapping surveillance authorities, and the loss of the current version of the law will leave the government with a range of tools that is still incredibly powerful.

We’ve made it clear that, while we’re not opposing it, USA Freedom just doesn’t go far enough for us to continue supporting it. We’ve noted some of our concerns—including the increase in the maximum sentence for material support for terrorism to 20 years. This provision, introduced at the behest of the intelligence community, deserves more attention.

In 2005, we called for the repeal of Section 805 of the Patriot Act, which broadened the crime of material support to any foreign organization the Secretary of State has designated as a “terrorist organization.” Here’s what we said about Section 805 of the Patriot Act then:

The discovery last week of another major flaw in TLS was announced, nicknamed "Logjam" by the group of prominent cryptographers who discovered it. It's getting so hard to keep track of these flaws that researchers at INRIA in France created a "zoo" classifying the attacks (which is not yet updated to include Logjam or the FREAK attack discovered in March). Despite the fact that these attacks seem to be announced every few months now, Logjam is a surprising and important finding with broad implications for the Internet. In this post I'll offer a technical primer of the Logjam vulnerability.

Tonight, the US Senate failed to move ahead with the USA Freedom Act, an NSA reform bill that would address phone record surveillance and FISA Court transparency and fairness. It also was unable to muster votes for a temporary reauthorization of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the section of law used to justify the mass phone records surveillance program. That’s good news: if the Senate stalemate continues, the mass surveillance of everyone’s phone records will simply expire on June 1.

Section 215 of the Patriot Act has been wrongly interpreted in secret by the government for years. We commend every Senator who voted against reauthorizing the unconstitutional surveillance of millions of law-abiding Americans.

In the wake of tonight’s vote, Congress must stop stalling and address the surveillance and secrecy abuses of our government.